'With Bekker? Yeah…'
'No, that was this morning; the afternoon paper…' Huerta picked up the paper they'd been looking at, closed it, and handed it to Lucas. On the cover was a woman's face, eyes staring; before the headlines reached the brain, the terror of the face came through, then the words: 'Kill #8-Bekker Death Pix. '
'This legit?' Lucas asked.
'That's Carson,' Carter said grimly. 'He sent notes and photos to three newspapers and two TV stations. They're using them.'
'Jesus…'
From down the hall, he heard a woman's voice.
Lily.
He walked down to the corner, found the room in semidarkness, the door open. He knocked, standing back, and Kennett said, 'Yeah?'
Lucas stuck his head in. 'Davenport,' he said.
'Come on in. We were just talking about you,' Kennett said. He was sitting in a visitor's chair in front of a standard-issue metal desk, his feet up. His shirt collar was open, and his bright Polynesian Gauguin tie was draped across a stack of phone books at the front edge of the desk. Lily sat in another chair at the side of the desk, facing him.
'Fuckin' photographs,' Lucas said.
'The shit is hitting the fan,' Kennett said grimly. 'First the New School thing and now the pictures. The mayor had the commissioner on the carpet. You could hear the screaming in Jersey.'
Lucas dragged a third chair around, bumped Kennett. 'Move your ass over so I can get my feet up.'
'And me with a fuckin' bad heart,' Kennett mumbled as he moved.
'You told Fell about the transvestite thing,' Lily said. She pushed the phone books out of the way, picked up the necktie.
Lucas shrugged, sat down, put his feet up. 'We talked it over and decided it was likely.'
'That came at a good time. We told everybody that Carson'll probably be the last, that we've pretty much got him pinned down,' she said.
'Should have thought of it sooner, the cross-dressing,' Kennett said glumly. 'The one before was a lesbian, we knew that. We should have seen that she wouldn't let a strange guy get too close, not outside a lesbian bar.'
'Hell, you did everything right…' Lily began.
Kennett interrupted: 'Everything but catch him…'
'He's pinned.'
'We fuckin' hope,' Kennett said.
Lily had been rolling the tie in her fingers, and now she looked down at the bare-breasted Polynesian woman, shook her head and said, 'This is the craziest tie.'
'Don't knocker it,' said Kennett, then slapped his leg and laughed at the pun, while Lily rolled her eyes.
'You were jerking me around, Gauguin and Christian Dior,' Lucas said to Kennett. He looked at Lily. 'He told me this Gauguin dude was Christian Dior's necktie partner.'
Lily laughed again, and Kennett said, 'How do you know he wasn't?'
'Looked him up,' Lucas said. 'He died in 1903. He was associated with the symbolists.'
'Now if you knew what a symbolist was, you'd be in fat city,' Lily said.
'It was the use of color specifically for its symbolic impact, the emotional and intellectual impact,' Lucas said. 'Which makes sense. Some holding cells are painted bubble-gum pink for the same reason. The color cools people out.'
Kennett, staring, said, 'I never fuckin' thought of that.'
'Carter tells me you'll have Bekker in three days at the outside,' Lucas said.
'That fuckhead. That's the kind of talk that gets us in trouble,' Kennett grumbled. 'We'll get him soon, but I wouldn't bet on the three days. If he's got food and water, he could hole up.'
'Still…'
'I figure no more than a week,' Kennett said. 'He'll break. I just hope I'm still working for the goddamn police department when it happens. I mean, people are pissed. These fuckin' pictures, man: the mess at the New School was nothing, compared to this.'
'People think cops…' Lucas started.
But Lily was shaking her head. 'It's not the people, it's the politicians. People understand you can't always catch a guy immediately; most of them do, anyway. But the politicians think they've got to do something, so what they do is run around and scream and threaten to fire people.'
'Mmmm. A week,' Lucas said. 'That's a long time, in ward-heeler years.'
'Anxious to get home?' Kennett asked.
'Nah. I'm enjoying myself. I want to be there for the bust.'
'Or the kill,' said Kennett.
'Whatever…'
Lily pushed herself out of the chair, stretched, and tousled Kennett's hair. 'Let's go look at the river,' she said.
'Jesus Christ, the woman's indefatigable, and me with this heart,' Kennett complained.
Lucas, vaguely embarrassed, stood and drifted toward the door. 'See you guys tomorrow…'
A message from Fell was waiting at the hotel: 'Call when you get in, until one o'clock.' He held the slip in his hand as he rode the elevator to his floor, dropped it on the bedstand, went into the bathroom, doused his face with hot water, and looked up in the mirror, the water trickling down his face.
He'd had a long relationship with a woman, the mother of his daughter, that now, when he looked back, seemed to have been based on a shared cynicism. Jennifer was a reporter, with too much time on the street, edging toward burnout. A baby, for her, had been a run at salvation.
He'd had a shorter, intense relationship with Lily, who had been struggling with the end of her own marriage; that might have been something, if they'd been in the same town, from the same emotional places. But they hadn't been, and some of the guilt of their affair still stuck to their relationship.
He'd had any number of other relationships, long and short, happy and unhappy. Most of the women he'd gone with still liked him well enough, in a wary, once-burned way; but he tended to think of them as others, not Jennifer, not Lily.
Fell was one of the others. A wistful, lovely, finally lonely woman. In a permanent relationship, they would drive each other crazy. He wiped his face with one of the rough hotel towels and wandered back to the bed. He sat down, picked up the phone, looked at the receiver for a moment, then smiled. He'd felt for a year as though he were under water: quiet, placid, out of it. The New York cops were bringing him up, and Fell was fixing him in other ways. He tapped out her number. She picked it up on the second ring.
'This is Lucas,' he said.
'Kennett knew it was you, but I got good mileage out of the cross-dressing thing,' Fell said, without preamble. 'My name was on the TV news, and it's in the Times and the Post. That never hurts.'
'I saw it…'
'I'd like to find a way to thank you. Oral sex comes to mind, if I get my share,' Fell said.
'Women are so forward these days,' Lucas said. 'How quick can you get here?'
Fell brought a change of clothes with her, and they spent the evening laughing and making love. The next morning, when they were dressed, Lucas asked, 'How would we find Jackie Smith?'
'Call his office,' she said.
'That easy?'
'He's a hustler,' Fell said. 'Getting found is part of his business.'
'So call him.'
Smith called back in five minutes. 'Aren't you guys ever going away? Can't you find out anything on your own?' he complained. 'I've done everything you wanted…'
